Mrs. Ramsey first read the novel after her daughter was assigned to
read it at the Corpus Christi School in Mobile, AL. While reading it,
she was angered to see that pregnant women were not well-regarded in the
futuristic society Lowry described. In addition, she was upset that the
would-be utopia limited the number of children families can have, and
that parents were driven to kill unwanted children by the said
regulation. Also, she didn't like that the government was run by
feminists.

In response, Mrs. Ramsey unsuccessfully tried to get The Giver
removed from the school's reading list, as detailed in a
letter to the school's parish priest.

Around the same time as Mrs. Ramsey's challenge, parents of two
students at Windsor Elementary School in Loves Park, IL, challenged the
presence of The Giver on the sixth grade reading list.
Superintendent John Hurley told the Rockford (IL) Register Star, "The
family feels the 'society of sameness' described in the book is being
held up as an ideal."

David Trosch, an ultra-conservative Catholic priest, runs the Life Enterprises Unlimited
website, which published Mrs. Ramsey's article. He wrote, "[The
Giver] is written for mentally careless or untrained people,
especially children, that can be easily led astray if the content does
not bring attention to unresolvable problems." There's a certain irony
to that statement.

Lowry noted in The (Bloomington, IL) Pantagraph that she purposefully
made the community in The Giver alluring. What those who
challenge the book never note is that ultimately Jonas, the novel's main
character, rebels against what he realizes is a horrible society.

The warning against the novel's totalitarian utopia has not been lost
in Germany, whose public schools Lowry said use The Giver "as a
way of introducing them to the study of their own country's history, of
presenting totalitarianism and its seduction."

One passage that is particularly controversial is the infanticide
scene, in which Jonas discovers his father killed a baby that was over
quota. "That is taken as promoting euthanasia," she told the Providence
(RI) Journal-Bulletin. She later told the Worcester (MA) Telegram &
Gazette, "...such criticism is missing the point that the scene is
trying to make."

"I just always wish the parents would read the book in full before
they challenge it," she said in an interview with the Boston Globe.

In addition to being called the antichrist, Lowry was once told in a
letter by an angry mother, "God is not pleased with you." She takes such
attacks in stride, even showing an audience at a discussion about book
banning in Holden, MA, a headline that read, "Blume, Lowry Novels as
Corrupt as Playboy."
"...I think adults are frightened by having it called to their
attention that kids have anything to do with sexuality or violence," she
told the Journal-Bulletin, adding that those topics are "the two things
that they most fear in my books, and which have made some of my books the
most offensive in the United States."

It comes as no surprise, then, the adults who challenge The
Giver underestimate their kids' ability to grasp Lowry's message.
Steve Arney wrote in an article for The Pantagraph that many teenagers he
talked to about the novel saw "benefits of security that Jonas' world
affords, but they wouldn't be willing to surrender freedom for it."

Come to think of it, maybe Mrs. Ramsey's take on the book's worldview
is closer to reality than I thought. Except for that part about the
feminists.